France and the Netherlands are mulling setting up their own versions of Germany’s Sprind innovation agency, which organises multi-stage competitive challenges to invent new technologies and promises to deliver money much faster than conventional funders.
The French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs has for the past two years seconded one of its employees to Sprind to see how it operates, and Sprind’s founder is now co-leading a task force to scope out how France could adopt its model.
Meanwhile, Sprind agreed earlier this year to launch joint technology challenges with the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova. And the Dutch are also thinking of setting up their own Netherlands Agency for Disruptive Innovation (NADI).
“The initiatives with France and the Netherlands and Sweden, they are not just ideas. They’re real,” Sprind’s founder Rafael Laguna de la Vera told Science|Business in an interview on the sidelines of the Falling Walls science conference in Berlin on November 7.
Mathilde Vivot, who has been seconded to Sprind from the French government, said that “all options are on the table and these scenarios, including Sprind’s model, will be duly analysed by a common task force.”
That task force will be led by de la Vera and Nicolas Dufourcq, chief executive of Bpifrance, a public investment bank, and will officially start work next week. Last month, Sprind and Bpifrance signed a memorandum of understanding to work more closely together, and launch joint calls for proposals.
For now, it’s not clear if France will set up an entirely new agency, or simply get Bpifrance or other funders to adopt some of Sprind’s ideas.
“That’s all to be decided,” said de la Vera, although he hopes France will indeed set up a new institution. “I think we have to create something new,” he said, because although Bpifrance was “doing a marvellous job for 20 years,” it is not an innovation agency.
On the other hand, Bpifrance has “achieved a level of freedom that I am even envious of. They’re like a private entity. I’m sort of half [private] half [public],” he said.
Ultimately it will be a “political decision” what elements of the Sprind model France adopts, de la Vera said. Regardless of the outcome, Sprind and Bpifrance want to launch joint challenge calls “really quickly,” he added.
The Netherlands too
Dutch efforts are not quite as advanced as French interest. “Right now it’s a commission,” , de la Vera said.
In July, the previous Dutch government announced a plan to bolster the country’s innovativeness, including scoping out NADI, which would be inspired by Sprind, the UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
NADI would offer challenge-based programmes involving “temporary teams of top experts from knowledge institutions and the business community. They are given a clear goal, a limited timeframe, and room to experiment,” the plan says.
Following the Dutch general election at the end of October, however, it could take months to form a new government, and it’s unclear to what extent any new coalition will adopt the NADI idea.
Still, the scoping exercise is continuing, with de la Vera travelling to The Hague in mid-December.
The Sprind model
The French and Dutch interest is the latest sign that European policymakers are looking to Sprind to radically shake up the way public innovation and technology development is done.
The agency was lauded by former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi in his report last year diagnosing the EU’s economic woes.
Draghi wants the EU to fund more “disruptive innovation,” with “a greater use of innovation challenges, similar to those developed by the German Sprind agency.”
The EU’s own agency, the European Innovation Council (EIC), is next year piloting its own challenges. These draw in part on the Sprind model, which pits teams against each other to develop a real-world technology, with some teams eliminated each year. Aside from challenges, Sprind also has a rolling open call for teams with breakthrough ideas.
One of Sprind’s selling points is how quickly it gets money to successful applicants. For its challenges, its target is 14 days from a call closing to winners getting money in the bank. The most driven innovators won’t wait months or even years for more conventional research funding, the agency argues, so speed is essential.
De la Vera said he was speaking to Michiel Scheffer, president of the EIC, to help the council speed up its own grants. The EIC hopes to get money to challenge applicants within two months.
“Of course, he has a harder nut to crack than me,” said de la Vera. “We only have one government. He has 27; that’s always a little more complex. And Brussels bureaucracy is probably also a little more complex than the German one.”
No BioNTech yet
For all the attention it has received so far from European policymakers, Sprind is still only six years old, and can’t boast of spawning a breakthrough technology just yet.
Still, it has backed a real world project to build the world’s tallest wind turbine, and 28 of its supported companies have so far received Series A or B funding. A five-year assessment in 2024 stressed it would take time before breakthrough companies emerged.
“Of course, we want the next BioNTech or something,” said de la Vera, referring to the start-up whose messenger RNA technology underpinned the first Covid vaccine. “If that happens, and it’s public and it has a valuation of €50 billion, nobody will ask questions anymore. But that takes 10, 15 years until that happens. We’re only here for six.”
Think tank
Sprind has also become something of a think tank on innovation policy, as well as a funder, advising the German government on how to make innovation easier and faster.
It has consulted on reforming German universities’ technology transfer office system, and is also funding a project to create European digital wallets, so that entrepreneurs don’t have to repeatedly visit German government offices to obtain various documents when founding a start-up. It can take new companies up to six months to get a tax number and become operational, said de la Vera.
“When I started Sprind, I thought it was going to be very simple,” he said. “You just pull out great projects, and then you help them flourish. Then you suddenly recognise that there are so many systematic breaks built into all these systems.”
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Asked whether the EU innovators lacked ideas, or the funding to scale them up, de la Vera said that money to grow was the bigger impediment.
“If you look at the number of patents per capita, we’re good, better than the US,” he said. “But when you look at the number of unicorns, we have a 20th [. . .] and that’s the problem.”
This implies that what Europe needs even more than new innovation agencies is a better functioning capital market for new companies.
“I wish we had a capital market union,” said de la Vera. “We are also supporting EU Inc [a campaign for a pan-European company structure]. We’re signing the petitions, we’re talking to politicians.”